In 2025, Active International’s Business Services team supported Reach plc with a wide range of travel, events, and goods requirements, enabling their teams to maximise the value of their trade credits while simplifying internal processes.

The Challenge

As a fast-paced national publisher, Reach regularly requires hotel accommodation, conference facilities, flights, incentive trips and employee rewards. These needs often arise at short notice and involve multiple stakeholders across departments – from media and sales to finance and executive assistants.

Reach needed a partner that could:
• Quickly source and secure hotel space and conference venues
• Arrange overnight accommodation and travel
• Manage incentive trips
• Supply goods such as retail vouchers
• Handle complex briefs with minimal input required from their teams

The Solution

Active’s Business Services team works closely with Reach to deliver responsive, flexible support.

In 2025 alone, Reach utilised trade credits across:
Hotel bookings for overnight stays
• Conference venues, including meeting rooms and breakout spaces
Flights and travel arrangements
• Incentive trips
• Retail vouchers, including significant volumes of John Lewis vouchers
• Additional ad hoc goods and services as required

Requests are often submitted as high-level briefs, with Active undertaking the detailed sourcing, negotiation and coordination behind the scenes. Even when plans evolve or do not proceed, the team absorbs the legwork -reducing internal workload for Reach and ensuring they always have options.

The Impact

Significant trade credit utilisation across travel and goods in 2025
• A streamlined process that allows Reach to access a broad range of services through one trusted partner
• Minimal administrative burden for Reach’s internal teams
• Ongoing daily collaboration demonstrating a strong, embedded partnership

Kelly Davies, Business Services, states:
“We make it easy for Reach. They can come to us with a top-line brief and we’ll handle the detail – from sourcing venues to organising travel and goods. It’s about being responsive and taking the workload off their teams.”

A Trusted, Long-Term Partnership
Active has worked with Reach (formerly Trinity Mirror) since 2019 in its current structure, building a consistent, collaborative relationship that allows Reach to convert media trade into tangible business value.

TESTIMONIAL

“Active International UK is a valued partner to Reach and plays an important role in helping us maximise the value of our media by converting it into meaningful business support. Their ability to turn media value into practical services – from travel and events to goods – makes a real difference to our day-to-day operations. Whether it’s hotels, conferences, travel or vouchers, the team takes care of the details and delivers quickly, which saves us a huge amount of time internally. The team is highly responsive, flexible, and consistently delivers solutions that meet our needs, often with minimal input required from our side. Their collaborative approach and ease of working make them a trusted extension of our team, and we look forward to continuing the partnership.”

Angela Woodhouse, Director of Trading and Business Intelligence, Reach plc